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Shortcake like Mother Never Made (unless Mother was an Italian Pastry Chef)

Amongst shortcake fans you have your biscuit-lovers and your sponge-cake devotees. Cake people are wrong, of course; in shortcake, biscuits are better. But every once in a while even my strongest convictions have to be altered.
After the Strawberry & Peach Shortcake I had recently at Willi’s Seafood & Raw Bar in Healdsburg I now concede that if the cake is made with cornmeal and topped with a toasted pine nut brittle I can be lured from biscuit loyalty. (Of course, just to confuse matters, Willi’s menu describles the shortcake base as a cornmeal biscuit, but to my tastebuds it was a cake.)
My first thought was that pine nuts, butter and sugar had been layered on the bottom of the pan, the batter poured on top and the cake flipped over for serving — sort of a variation on pineapple upside-down cake.
A phone call to Willi’s chef Matt Laurell erased that quick-and-easy theory. Seems that first one must toast the pine nuts, use them to make a pine nut brittle (known In Italy as *crocante*), scatter bits of the brittle atop the raw batter and then bake. Fiddly work, as Nigella would say, but oh-so-worth it.
Laurell said his brittle uses brown sugar, molasses and corn syrup. The closest-seeming recipe I could find was on the food network’s site, but I suspect that any brittle recipe would give a similar result. Before the last of the peaches and nectarines vanish from the farmers’ markets, I’m going to give this a try.

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Saturday, October 6th, 2007 at 8:54 pmand is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.